Dragon Ball GT

With the manga finished, Toei carried on alone. Dragon Ball GT opens on a badly worded wish that turns Goku back into a child, then sends him after seven balls of another kind, scattered across the galaxy and carrying a debt.

The series deliberately returns to the travelling format of the early days before tipping into two darker arcs: a line of cyborgs born from a machine, then the dragons produced by the repeated use of wishes. That last idea is GT’s best: the balls stop being a neutral tool and start charging interest.

Akira Toriyama supplied the visual concept and a few designs, but the writing belongs to the studio. That is why these archives file GT as a parallel continuity: Dragon Ball Super, arriving twenty years later, restarts from before GT and does not pick it up.